failed suitors
by douglas messerli
Christopher
Hampton and Robert Schenkkan (screenplay, based on the novel by Graham Greene),
Phillip Noyce (director) The Quiet
American / 2002
Phillip Noyce’s 2002 adaptation of Graham
Greene’s The Quiet American is a
sensual film with a kind of “ugly American” backdrop. While superficially Alden Pyle (Brendan
Fraser) may be a quiet American medic who “accidentally” falls in love with
British reporter Thomas Fowler’s (Michael Caine) Vietnamese lover, Phuong (Do
Thi Hai Yen), by movie’s end we come to perceive him as very loud
self-aggrandizing mass murderer, in charge of a mission to interject the
American forces into the long battle between the French and the Communists in
Viet Nam.
While Pyle pretends to be a gentleman who
claims to be able to speak only two words of Vietnamese, in truth he speaks the
language fluently, and is secretly manipulating the self-proclaimed General Thé
to create further havoc within the country so that the US will be forced to
enter the political fray. And ultimately he usurps Fowler’s Phuong with the
surety of a born conqueror.
Phuong, herself, has lived many years as
a prostitute, working for her sister, who runs a dancing-dining establishment.
Although
we come to see Alden Pyle as the most dangerous figure of Greene’s sad tale of
the destruction of the Vietnamese nation and its people, there are no true
heroes in his world. American advisors such as Joe Tunney and Bill Granger are
presented as shady figures and drunks. Phuong’s older sister, far from being
the “perfect saint” Fowler ironically describes her as being, is a manipulator,
determined to have a sister marry a wealthy American.
Even the Inspector who is investigating Pyle’s
death outwardly disdains the American involvement in the country and appears too
diffident to truly explore his suspicions that Fowler has been involved.
Yet
Noyce and writers Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan seem to want to
redeem Fowler; after all he gets the girl by default and, through a tacked-on
ending not in the original Greene fiction, we see a series on ongoing reports
he makes in the years after as the war progresses.
But, obviously, the truth is that
everyone in Graham’s world has nearly equal qualities of good and evil within
them, with their interactions often ending in tragedy. Pyle’s longed-for “third
force,” in fact, is neither the French colonialists nor the Americas, but the
communists themselves who returned the country to a kind of wholeness that no
outsiders could bring about.
Los Angeles,
March 4, 2016
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